Having read all my years of blog posts in the last year I've noticed a bunch of digital bread crumbs I left myself along the way. They are the crumbs that help me find who I am across the longer period of time that the blog covers. Seeing all that in the short period of a few weeks has an effect on me. It reminded me why I got into this often bewildering and sometimes angering encounter with computers and their indifference to my life. But the underlying compulsion is to tell my story. When paper and notebooks were the media on hand, I used that to write in and to illustrate my life and interests in pictures. Recording too was always a matter of using whatever was on hand and trying to make something with it. About a decade ago the computer became appealing in the way it tied all that together. By then the programs were evolved enough that I was not required to be a programmer to achieve anything. (A reference to the dark ages in 1983-85 when I had my first encounters with desktop computers).

Technology is not really my strong suit. Trying to see life as meaningful is. Technology offers a chance to document it and share it. The evidence is already in my collected project of journaling that I would resort to hand typing stuff and cutting out magazine or product brochure images. My earliest produced recordings amounted to just that and those eventually matured into doing a production ready CD with real output (bad art printed well, I admit) and a glass master CD. My photo albums from about high school onward were affairs of taping pictures to paper and typing captions alongside. These days I see that in the galleries on this site. The endless journals in school notebooks, a project beginning on the day after I graduated from high school, is clearly the ancestor to the endless blog articles here now. You could say that this journal is really a 20 year project, and more if you dig farther back into the prehistory.

On a whim a couple years ago I subtitled the site "Like, the greatest story ever told, man..." I mean for it to be said in that drugged out Grateful Dead kind of way. I didn't know it at the time but the movie by that name was one about Jesus. Pardon any pretense on my part, I was ignorant of that. But I don't really shirk from the part. Not about being anyone's savior, but about the fact that Jesus is really the model human life of enduring rejection and suffering even to the point of death and coming out of the whole thing a new being. The greatest story ever told isn't just one of Jesus, the man who walked the earth all those years ago and who died and somehow carried on as some type of burning memory-consciousness in the hearts of some oddball followers. That is great, but the real greatness of the story is the spiritual victory it contains: that all the suffering and trials are formation measures to become something far greater.

Well, if that isn't a great story, what is? I happen to have lived my version of that and identify with it just fine. That kind of spiritual death and rebirth with a hunger to reach beyond oneself is the greatest story ever told. Dying to self to live for others is what makes it great.

TAPKAE.com now is more of a place to hold the tension between what was and what now is. I've decided to transparently embrace the confusing mix of who this Ed is. Oh sure, that can be dangerous stuff sometimes. Some of it will turn up in Google searches and might be grounds for disqualification or dismissal from jobs. The fact is, I am pretty exhausted from living in a house divided. Disowning parts of myself is bad spirituality and bad psychology. These days, the freedom to tell the story comes from within. I am only bound really by my attention to the details involved in sitting and writing or scanning/editing/uploading pictures or audio. I have my bursts of interest in the stuff. I'll probably never get done what I want to have done. C'est la vie. But I want to deconstruct the internal walls of this online box and make the place more spacious and less divided.